Gov. Tony Evers signs new election maps, ending Wisconsin Republicans' grip on legislative power

Here I am, sitting in Louisiana where my newly gerrymandered district (4) simultaneously covers a third of the state, surrounds an entire other district, and cuts a relatively blue city clean in half (Lake charles at the bottom).

All so the state can comply with the court order to add another black district while keeping the republican stranglehold.

It's not happening by choice; it's happening because voters elected a state Supreme Court which forced it

I mean... People live in regions. Those regions have representatives. How are those regions defined? Maps. Nothing uniquely American about it as far as I can tell.

It's a start.

It's way closer to right. See: https://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/2024/01/analysis-of-proposed-legislative-redistricting-plans-submitted-to-the-wisconsin-supreme-court/

Vote in 2022 for State Assembly ended up with 35D/64R, with D's getting 44.6% of the overall vote. The Evers maps that are now adopted would have made it 46D/53R. So D's would get 46.5% of the seats for 44.6% of the vote. It's a slight D over performance, but no maps are going to be perfectly representative, and this is way closer to what it should be.

The path to having this happen in Wisconsin was for a set of left-leaning judges to be elected to a majority on the state Supreme Court, and then rule that gerrymandering violated the state constitution. This forced a redraw of the maps.

I suspect all the talk about "better representation" is BS. The real reason was technical - collecting votes from an entire continent was not feasible unless you used some proxies. The electoral collage was established half a century before the telegraph was invented. Today we have computer networks. Direct representation is doable.

Before 2010, a number of Democratic states, including California, implemented independent redistricting commissions and the likes in order to prevent gerrymanders.

In 2010, the Republicans took a number of state legislatures, and were then able to use the every-10-years redistricting to gerrymander their way into permanent power and increase their share of seats in the the federal House of Representatives.

This has meant that further anti-gerrymandering measures in Democratic-leaning states would give the Republicans permanent control over one branch of the Federal government, so Democratic-leaning states adopted a no-unilateral-disarmament policy, where they're no longer passing measures like that at the state level, but regularly try to pass a federal anti-gerrymandering law, which would eliminate it nationally. To date, none of those attempts has gotten past a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

The major notable instance of Democrat gerrymandering is in Massachusetts. They gerrymandered the state so that rather than Republicans having 0 winnable districts, they have 1.

You don't need to cheat when your party hasn't been attacking the citizenry for the last 50+ years.

Historically, both are guilty. Today, Republicans are more guilty than Democrats, and this largely comes down to timing and new algorithms to create maps. I'm not going to claim Democrats are inherently more righteous on this issue, except to say that they're the victimized group and therefore have more incentive to create fair maps right now.

The US Constitution specifies having a census every 10 years, and then a redistricting happens. In 2010, Republicans rode a wave of hate against Obama with the Tea Party, which swept them into a lot of state level offices. This meant they controlled the state legislatures and governors offices that were in charge of redistricting. At the same time, new mapping software let them create extremely lopsided maps. There are cases of individual houses being carved out into one district or another.

This let them hold onto power in those states for the next 10 years. When the 2020 census came around, they still had power, and thus controlled the next round of redistricting. In Wisconsin, that affected the 2022 elections. However, there was also a series of elections for state supreme court, and the 2022 election put in the last liberal justice needed to swing the decision. The maps were ruled unconstitutional, and now we have something where Republicans getting 45% of the vote in the State Assembly means they lose.

(That, BTW, is based on what happened in 2018 for the Wisconsin State Assembly. Vote was 53% D/45% R, but the seats broke down 36D/63R.)

This has to be fixed in Wisconsin before voting methods could be fixed (and a whole list of other things). We only got this because voters put in a state supreme court justice who specifically ran on the map issue.

Incidentally, those state supreme court elections are a non-partisan primary system, so it's not FPTP already. In practice, all the candidates are unofficially aligned to one of the two national parties, which is an example of FPTP not being the complete story.

See also: a bunch of southern states with runoff voting, where their state offices have been just as filled with Democrats and Republicans as anywhere else in the US over the last century.

Yes, that's something which would work just fine. The situation we're in looks like this:

• The Supreme Court has ruled that partisan gerrymandering is constitutional
• Republicans block anti-gerrymandering laws in the federal Senate
• If one party ends gerrymandering in states they control (as Democrats started to do between 2000 and 2010) they're effectively ceding power to the other party on a permanent basis